Akita Private Beta: Catch breaking changes faster

👋 hunters! After putting out an early iteration a few months ago, we’re excited to officially launch our private beta—and to make our docs public for the first time! And we'd like to give a big thank-you to all the users and friends of Akita who got us here. 😊 🚗 How we got here In 2018, I was a CS professor at Carnegie Mellon University. When Cambridge Analytica hit, I started asking friends in industry how they knew what data their apps were sending around. It turned out that there was no good solution for understanding interactions across APIs—not just for privacy and security, but also for reliability and diagnostics. When I realized that this was the exact problem I’d been teeing up to solve, I took leave from my job, sold my furniture, and drove across the country to start Akita. There is now a small team of us working on Akita, coming from places like Twilio and Amazon. Our team’s experience building in service-oriented environments made everyone especially excited to build a product that would help developers move faster together. 🔎 Source code isn’t the whole story At Akita, we believe the way to understand your software is through your APIs. Our solution builds dynamic models of API behavior in order to automatically: ✅ Catch breaking changes on every pull request ✅ Generate specs for any API ✅ Update API specs on every pull request ✅ Discover and document endpoints 🏗 How we built it From the beginning of Akita, I knew where I wanted us to go: automatically map out the graph of API interactions. This would be key to improving reliability, diagnostics, and security in modern web apps. What we didn’t know was exactly how we would get there. Should we integrate with a tracing library? Should we build a proxy? After talking with dozens of developers and engineering leaders, we came up with three main requirements. First, whatever we built needed to work with any tech stack. Second, people needed to be able to integrate our solution in minutes. Finally, we wanted something that could run in production without adding overhead or exposing sensitive data. These were not easy requirements to balance! After over a year of building, we’re super excited to launch a solution that requires no code changes, no proxies, works with any language, and integrates in just minutes. Akita works by watching API traffic, analyzing and sanitizing the traffic locally to share only metadata back to our cloud. This means you can Akita deploy Akita anywhere: your laptop, CI/CD, or production—without having to worry about us seeing your data. We are really proud of our approach and believe it is the future of cloud observability. And for those who are curious, our tech stack is Go, typed Python, and React. 😊 💖 Let’s work together to make software development better We believe that Akita can help anybody with a web app who wants to move quickly without losing customers. We understand that we have a long way to go in order to achieve the vision—and that the only way to get there is by getting feedback early and often from people like you. We’d love to have you try out the private beta! We’ll also be checking the comments here for feedback and questions. We look forward to hearing from you. Onward ⚡️, Jean P.S. Thank you to the veterans out there! P.P.S. Follow our updates and tell us what you think on Twitter @AkitaSoftware!